Tuesday, November 08, 2016

Live Election Maps

The early projections are now in and it appears that traditional choropleth maps have taken a lead in media reports of live results from the U.S. election. There has been a lot of discussion during the campaign about how election maps can distort the overall picture of how America has voted. Lots of pollsters have therefore predicted that cartogram maps were going to be the big winner in this year's election.

However early results from The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Guardian suggest that the choropleth map will be the big winner in this election. The live election maps from all three newspapers allow you to view live election results for the President, the Senate and the House, coloring each election area by the party of the (projected) winner.

Early election results however can be misleading. I suspect that over the next few days, as the media carries out more detailed analysis of the results, we will see a lot more cartograms visualizing where and how American's have voted.